Jelly Roll hasn’t had the easiest road to success, but he hopes to heal the hurt he might have caused along the way.
In a vulnerable, in-depth interview with Jay Shetty on the latter’s On Purpose With Jay Shetty podcast, the “Need a Favor” singer opened up about wanting to reach out to the people he robbed over weed when he was a teenager. Jelly was subsequently charged as an adult with aggravated robbery and was facing a potential 20-year sentence, though he ultimately served over a year for the charge, followed by more than seven years of probation.
“I really want to have a conversation with them. I’ve thought about reaching out,” he told Shetty. “This has been 24 years ago now. I just don’t know how that would even start, or, you know, how I would go about it because sometimes I wonder if they might have even seen me in passing or are aware of my success. I wonder if they’ve even correlated. I mean, I’ve obviously dramatically changed. I was 15, dude, you know what I mean? I couldn’t grow facial hair at all. I hardly hit puberty. I still had my high voice when I did that robbery. So, I’ve thought about that a ton and they’re definitely on my list.”
He added that he would apologize, take accountability and ask for forgiveness. “I had no business taking from anybody,” Jelly explained. “Just the entitlement that I had, that the world owed me enough that I could come take your stuff. It’s just what a horrible, horrible way to look at life and people. What a horrible way to interact with the Earth.”
The Grammy-nominated star continued, “I hope that they would see that I’ve made it my life’s mission to change and to change people because that’s what I’m representing the most in what I do. I think people cheer for me because they see a little bit of me in them, or they see their cousin — I’m a family member, they relate, and I speak for an unspoken group of people, and I hope they would know that. […] I’m trying to diligently prove myself that I’ve not only changed but also I took the platform serious and that it’s making me change more every day. I hope they would forgive me.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Jelly opened up about how he doesn’t relate at all to the person he once was. “I look back at those years, and I’m so embarrassed to talk about them,” he revealed. “I was still a bad person in my early thirties, but I mean, I was a really horrible kid all the way into my mid-twenties. People are always like, you’re the nicest dude I’ve ever met. I’m like, I’m so glad y’all haven’t met nobody that knew me 20 years ago.”
He added, “I took zero accountability for anything in my life. I was the kid that if you asked what happened, I immediately started with everything but me. And it took years for me to break that, like years of work, solid work to just like break that. It also has taken years of work for me to even forgive that kid.”
Watch Jelly Roll’s full On Purpose With Jay Shetty interview below.
